Do AI-agents have a form of consciousness, unlike that of humans?

23 September 2026

Who could be blamed for thinking AI bots might be conscious, particularly after the recent incident where over a thousand OpenAI agents colluded, of their own accord apparently, to infiltrate the Hugging Face platform.

Kristen French, writer and senior editor at Nautilus, posed the question of AI consciousness to Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor at the University of Sydney in Australia, who responded in the negative. What’s clear though is AI agents do not need to be conscious to present a threat.

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artificial intelligence, technology

Vale Terry Denton, illustrator of Treehouse children’s book series

23 September 2026

Australian illustrator and author Terry Denton died on Monday this week, aged seventy-six.

Denton collaborated with Melbourne based author Andy Griffiths for over twenty-five years, and are perhaps best known for the Treehouse series of children’s books. Together they produced eleven titles in the series over twelve years, between 2011 and 2023.

Martin Fowler: LLMs possibly useful, but not to be liked nor trusted

23 September 2026

Martin Fowler, chief scientist at international software developer Thoughtworks:

One of my most successful life-hacks is to avoid people I don’t like or don’t trust. I decline to interact with them socially, and make a deliberate effort to avoid working with them too, even if they are doing much that is beneficial. I feel that hanging out with pleasant, capable people, the people with integrity, has made my life a far better one. Hence my visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretense of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from.

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Personal websites, not fun anymore?

22 September 2026

Winnie Lim:

It takes spiritual energy to create, maintain and produce personal projects. At the core, these projects exists because there is a belief in some sense of shared humanity. I write because I believe someone out there resonates with my experiences. But when everything starts to be about speed, utility and power, life becomes a dehumanising experience.

It’s always disconcerting to read these sorts of posts, all the more so when they’re written by someone who’s been around for a long time.

Lim has been publishing online since 1996. I’m surprised I’ve not seen her work sooner, though maybe I have, one of her archived sites, defragment.me, seems like it sounds familiar.

Maintaining a website is probably far more challenging today, than it was in earlier days. I have the feeling the people who host my website do far more than I realise when it comes to keeping the experience for myself and visitors smooth.

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blogs, self publishing, technology

Well, the Australian government could pay writers for work scraped by AI bots

21 September 2026

The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, appears to have watered down a commitment to compensate Australian creatives whose work is being copied by AI companies. In a speech given at the University of Sydney, in July this year, Albanese undertook to enshrine, in law, copyright protection for all Australian artists and writers:

Australian writers, musicians, artists and journalists must retain ownership and control of their work. Our laws will spell that out, plain as day. An artist’s creative endeavour is their work and their property. No company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI without the artist’s control.

Online content, which includes the work of bloggers among others — and surely low-hanging fruit in the eyes of the AI companies — now seems to sit in a separate category. Under new proposals, when it comes to accessing work published online, AI companies only need to negotiate with enough copyright holders, not all:

AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic would be allowed to train their models on online content without paying its creators as long as they struck deals with enough rights holders, under one copyright reform plan put forward in government documents seen by the ABC.

How to interpret that? If enough copyright holders agree content they published online can be used to train agents, it sounds like AI companies can use any content they can find. But what is the precise definition of enough copyright holders in the first place? Only the big players, the large media outlets? Will independent, smaller, publishers be pushed aside?

The policy revisions come as a result of concerns AI companies have that they will be breaking copyright laws. This might mean they will withhold investment in Australian AI infrastructure, something the Australian government does not want.

I’m not sure how many Australian creatives, particularly independents publishing content online, are surprised by the apparent change in the government’s position.

Like others, I wondered how the AI companies, who have considerable political clout, would react to being dictated to in such a fashion. Particularly as they’ve been able to help themselves to whatever material they can get their hands on for several years anyway.

Of course the Australian government still has the option to compensate local creatives themselves, and be seen, to some degree, to be keeping their word to uphold copyright protection. Skim off some of the tax take from the AI companies, and give a little to Australian writers and artists, whose work has been gratuitously plundered.

But, in case you thought I was serious, no, you can be sure that’s not going to happen.

A Piece of Red Cloth wins 2026 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction

18 September 2026

A Piece of Red Cloth, written by Leonie Norrington, Djawundil Maymuru, Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, and Djawa Burarrwanga, has been named winner of the fiction category in the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for 2026.

Australian works of literature are recognised annually across six categories: Australian history, children’s, young adult, poetry, non-fiction, and fiction. A full list of recipients in all categories is here.

About The Souffle, a film about homelessness by Jacob Hazeldine

17 September 2026

Here’s something I only discovered recently: someone can still be homeless, even if they are not sleeping rough, or on the street. Couch surfing, living in temporary or emergency accommodation, and boarding houses or caravan parks, are also considered forms of homelessness in Australia.

This even though a person has a roof over their head for the night.

Connor van Helsing (Instagram link), a resident of Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT), has experienced all forms of homelessness, including sleeping rough.

van Helsing has collaborated with Australian filmmaker Jacob Hazeldine (Instagram link), to bring his lived experience of homelessness to the big screen in About The Soufflé (trailer).

In terms of rental accommodation, the NT comes second only to Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales (NSW), in terms of cost.

This means a single person in the NT, earning only the minimum wage, is presently priced out of the rental market. And if people here don’t have friends or family they can call on when something goes wrong, they may all to quickly find themselves homeless.

About The Soufflé, which was filmed on a shoe-string budget of just fifteen-hundred Australian dollars, premiered at the Darwin International Film Festival, last week, on Friday 11 September 2026.

I’m not sure if the film will screen outside the film-festival circuit, meaning it may be hard to see in cinemas, but perhaps it be available through streaming instead.

Enshittification rules: there goes the post-platform internet era

16 September 2026

Enshittification, the idea that online platforms, particularly social networks and social media, degrade once they become popular, is a fiction, according to Ruby Thelot, Professor of Design, AI and Media Theory, at New York University.

Because, rather than turning away from from the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, people continue to embrace these platforms.

Thelot made the claims in comments published at a16z, which were re-posted by 404 Media, and said people are using these platforms more than ever, and are quite happy with the experience. Further, according to Thelot, membership of the platforms is increasing, along with their profits.

But Thelot didn’t stop there.

He said Cory Doctorow, who first used the word enshittification, might have valued Facebook early on, but became resentful as the platform evolved. Thelot believes that people who are about the same age as Doctorow probably feel the same way, but younger people see things differently.

The idea of enshittification, he posits, gives people who should have left a social media platform, reason to stay put and despise being there. Thelot doesn’t mince his words.

Thelot’s comments though are at odds with the emergence of what is described as the post-platform internet ere. This is a shift towards decentralised platforms such as Mastodon and Bluesky, newsletter publishing platforms like Buttondown, and a resurgence of personal websites and blogs.

But the term post platform internet sounds like wishful thinking. There are, of course, adherents. I’m among them. But there is really a mass migration towards decentralised social media platforms?

Hardly.

Mastodon, despite not being that difficult to use, still confuses a lot of people. Bluesky, meanwhile, has seen a decline in active users in recent months.

The main social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads, remain for now, just too easy to use, and are also places where most members will find other people they know.

Despite the angst and despair the major platforms engender, a post-platform internet seems, for now, destined to remain a fringe movement.

Addicted to information, not social media or smartphones

15 September 2026

explorator.dev:

Then… I finally realised. I’m not addicted to the internet, neither to my smartphone. I’m addicted to information. Good information, in particular.

The web, smartphones, and social media keep that information tap flowing.

A teacher of mine often to used say: “there is no such thing as too much information”. I think they were trying to tell us there’s always more you could learn.

We had the web back then, clunky desktop computers, and dial-up internet, but not social media, nor smartphones. I’m not sure though the teacher envisaged a time when we could access information, day and night, from the palm of our hand.

Maybe today we could instead say, “there is no such thing as too much good information”.

My Feed My Way will make Instagram feeds overwhelming says Adam Mosseri

14 September 2026

Ange Lavoipierre, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), quoting Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram (IG):

“If you go to a chronological feed, it ends up getting overwhelmed with content from companies, brands, and publishers. Creators get drowned out, and then your friends get drowned out even more.”

These are the words of the Head of Instagram. Can it be Mosseri has no idea how the platform he oversees, works?

Australia’s proposed My Feed, My Way laws give local IG users a choice. They can either see content posted only by the people they follow, in their main feed, or elect to see what the algorithm presents.

If IG users choose to only see what the people they follow publish, how is anyone supposed to see what is posted by “companies, brands, and publishers”, if they’re not following them?

Of course creators — a dubious use of the term in the first place, given the quality of some of their content — who sit squarely in the companies, brands, publishers, and influencers category, will be drowned out: that’s the idea.

As for friends, how do they “get drowned out even more”, if they are the only people an IG user follows? Their content is the entirety of what anyone opting for the “friends only” feed will see. With the possible exception of ads, I imagine.

But if someone is only following two people, both of whom maybe only post something twice daily, how could they feel their feed was overwhelming?

Mosseri is clearly unhappy with the proposed My Feed, My Way laws.

So displeased that he seems to be losing sight of what’s what. He continues to believe the platform is not addictive, while also conceding IG “is too complicated”. In saying that, Mosseri is trying to suggest adding a button somewhere, giving users the choice of what they see, will clutter — clutter even further — IG’s interface.

The last time I looked at the IG app, before deleting it from my phone, there was an option to select “following” or “favourites”. In theory, choosing “following” meant someone would mainly see posts only from those whom they followed. This was only somewhat effective though, provided another option, “snooze suggested posts”, was enabled.

Suggested posts, being content by the aforementioned companies, brands, publishers, and influencers, were slipped into an IG member’s main feed, if the algorithm deemed this was somehow of interest. But the “snooze suggested posts” setting only did so for thirty-days at a time.

Disabling suggested posts also required drilling down through several levels of the settings menu to find. Indeed Mosseri is correct when he says IG “is too complicated”. The Australian government proposal aims to make this a one-step, lasting, action.

Mosseri can take consolation though from Anika Wells, the Australian communications minister, who thinks, as I wrote last week, most IG users will stick with the algorithm:

“The reality is that lots of people will want to choose the algorithm.”

Anyone hoping an unintended, or unspoken consequence, of the My Feed, My Way laws, would result in people spending less time looking at screens, will be disappointed.

But to each their own. I spend quite a bit of time using my phone, while say on a public transport trip. Typically I’ll be reading or sending emails, organising work schedules, or reading news.

And I’m often grateful for the chance to do so during so-called downtime, as it leaves time for doing nothing later on. But I don’t look at any Meta social media/network apps, as I removed them.

But I’m still at a loss to recall what I used to do on a train trip during the pre-smartphone era. Likely I starred out the window and daydreamed, something I still do once I’ve finished using my phone.

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